Stop Skipping These 4 Neglected Movement Patterns!

Most bodyweight workouts are push-ups, squats, and burpees (which are usually just push-ups and squats done faster and pretty stupid).

These exercises became popular because they work.

But “works” and “covers everything you need” are two different claims, and the second one falls apart pretty quickly.

Push-ups and squats are bilateral and linear. Both arms, both legs, straight ahead. You do enough of them and you’ll get strong in exactly that direction. The problem is that you don’t live in exactly that direction. You rotate. You move laterally. You catch yourself off-balance. You use one arm or one leg at a time more often than both together.

So if your entire training diet is bilateral linear movements, your body develops gaps. And those gaps show up as the tight shoulders, stiff hips, and lower back pain that send you searching for “mobility routine” on YouTube at 11pm.

In the video below, Ryan demonstrates four exercises that fill in exactly those gaps. Each one trains a movement pattern that standard bodyweight workouts skip entirely.

If you just wanna jump right to the action, skip to around 1:50 for the first exercise 🙂

What Each Exercise Actually Does

The Spiderman builds pushing strength with rotation and upper-lower body coordination. A push-up locks you into one plane. The Spiderman forces your arms and legs to work together the way they do when you’re actually moving through the world — throwing, reaching, catching yourself.

The Crab works your shoulders in the opposite direction from everything else you do. Most pushing exercises (and most of your daily life) load the front of the shoulders. The Crab loads the back. That balance is what keeps your shoulders functional under pressure and prevents the chronic stiffness that comes from only training one direction. It also builds serious wrist, arm, and core strength as a side effect.

The Walking Frogger addresses the hips. Sitting all day tightens your hip flexors and weakens your legs in deep ranges. Standard squats help, but they’re bilateral — both legs doing the same thing at the same time. The Walking Frogger uses each leg independently, which is how your legs actually work when you walk, run, and change direction. You don’t need to go as deep as Ryan does in the video. Start higher, take smaller steps, and work deeper gradually.

The Monkey 180 trains rotational strength and mobility through the core and hips. This is the pattern most fitness programs ignore entirely, which is wild considering how much of real-world movement involves twisting. Even a 90-degree version gives you the rotational work your body is missing. You don’t need the full 180 or the deep squat to benefit.

Why These Specific Patterns Matter

Your body is designed to rotate, move laterally, and use your limbs independently. Training that ignores those capabilities is like learning guitar by only playing open chords — you’ll get some sounds out of it, but you’re going to hit a wall, and it’s going to be a frustrating one.

These four exercises cover what squats, push-ups, and planks leave out: rotational pressing, shoulder extension, unilateral leg work, and core rotation with coordination. When you can do all of these continuously for several minutes, you’ve got conditioning that matches burpees but builds a healthier body in the process — joints that move freely, muscles that work in multiple directions, and coordination that transfers to whatever you want to do outside your training.

The movements in this video are all from our Elements program. If you want a complete training system built around these patterns (with progressions that match your current level), that’s what Elements is for.